Getting into Guinness Read online

  On August 27, 1955, the McWhirter’s office manager walked into the Superlatives Limited headquarters with the very first bound copy of the book, bearing a plain green linen cover and the words The Guinness Book of Records, along with the brewery’s trademark harp logo, all embossed in gold. (The harp is a popular image in Ireland, appearing in the Republic’s coat of arms, on coins, and as the symbol of Trinity College, Dublin. The image appears on the Guinness label, and in addition to its namesake stout, the company also brews one of the world’s great lagers, fittingly named Harp.) It also included a moving foreword by the Earl of Iveagh, the Guinness chairman, implying that more than mere ink and paper, the book was something that could turn the heat of an argument into the light of knowledge. For those familiar with editions printed in the last forty years, the dignified original bears only a vague resemblance to what The Guinness Book of Records has evolved into. It was, after all, inspired by encyclopedias, and it is very much a research book, conservative in appearance and something to be put on the bookshelf alongside the World Almanac and dictionary. Amazingly, despite its tiny editorial and research staff, and the incredible time pressure to produce it, the original book contained some 8,000 records, far more than today’s volume, reaching a level of comprehensiveness that would consistently decline over time even as the book got thicker and larger. The decision was made to price the 198-page book, complete with illustrations and a full-color frontispiece (a luxury at the time), at just five shillings (£0.25, or about fifty U.S. cents today). Opening the cover today, the original book remains as dramatic as it must have been to the first readers more than half a century ago, who were confronted with two almost totally blank white pages, bearing just a few words on the lower right-hand corner:

  MOUNT EVEREST (29,160 FEET)

  The highest mountain in the world

  Wonderfully bereft of punctuation, it summed up so much of what the book would become known for, including an “-est,” in this case highest, and an “in the world,” representative of the name by which the book would later become known, one of not just records but world records. Readers flipping this page were then greeted by a rarity in 1955, a full-color picture of the mountain itself, wrapped in clouds, a suitably massive image for the collection of superlatives they held in their hands.

  The first copy was sent to the man who had commissioned the work. Sir Beaver promptly wrote back to the twins:

  On arrival home last Sunday I found your letter of 27th August and the first bound copy of The Guinness Book of Records. I did greatly appreciate your sending me this. I have read through the greater part of it and am amazed at the skill with which you have put it together. As value for the money I think there is not likely to be anything like it on the book market this year.

  The first print run was 50,000 copies, which would have been quite optimistic were it not for the huge base of pubs already affiliated with Guinness. Commercial sales started quite slowly, and the Superlatives team was crestfallen when W. H. Smith, the nation’s leading book retailer, ordered a scant six copies—and insisted on the option to return them. Ross, Norris, and their small staff tried to reason this unexpected resistance out in their offices, but within two hours of having returned from their personal call on Smith, the bookseller, presumably after having begun to actually read the fascinating work, rang back and increased the quantity to 100. Later that afternoon Smith again changed its tune, ordering a thousand copies. By the week’s end this one account had ordered a full fifth of the entire print run. “The realization dawned on us quite quickly that the book which had been produced to settle arguments in pubs…was about to become a best seller. Ross and I had long had the suspicion that our own fascination for records and superlatives might not have been as quirkish as some of our closer friends had thought, but until now there had been no confirmation that it would arouse such a widespread enthusiasm among others.”

  According to Ken Jennings in Brainiac, the McWhirters had a ripe market for their project because the English had long been enthusiasts of odd facts. “The earliest roots of trivia, in the sense of miscellaneous-and-not-entirely-useful-facts, date back to the ‘commonplace book’ of ye olde England…at the dawn of the Victorian age, a commonplace book was becoming something a little less commonplace: a miscellany of random facts the writer happened to find interesting. A book like Sir Richard Phillips’s 1830 A Million of Facts is half almanac (listing eclipses, weights and measures, and so on) but half trivia book as well. Tradesmen and farmers of the time had no practical need to know that ‘The oldest known painting in England is a portrait of Chaucer, painted in panel in 1390.’” Phillips’s language from over a century earlier is quite similar to entries in the early Guinness books, as Stephen Moss, a reporter for Britain’s Guardian newspaper confirms. “It is also historically misleading to think of the GBR as a pioneer. The late nineteenth century was awash with almanacs and annuals—a reflection of the Victorian age’s fetish for collection and its faith in fact.” Regardless, there was nothing on the market like The Guinness Book of Records when it debuted in 1955, and whether it broke new ground or rekindled old desires, everyone wanted one. Its timing may well have contributed to yet another U.K. trivia outbreak that Jennings describes: “Pub trivia, like 1960s rock and roll, is a British invasion, and just like the Beatles, it can be traced to Liverpool, circa 1959.”

  “It makes sense that it started in the pubs, because we have such a unique pub culture in this country,” Mark Frary, author and correspondent for London’s Times, told me. “People think nothing of spending a few hours every night in their pub; it is a very social aspect of life, and that was where people gathered and the book gained an audience. It was just the British eccentricity of it all that fascinated people, and people loved it.”

  Norris was right about the realization inspired by W. H. Smith’s huge order. By December the book had become a best seller, beginning a tradition that would continue every single year in which a new volume was released. It had never been envisioned as an annual, and it would be more than a decade before dates began appearing on the cover of the book. The first edition simply became known as the “green” one, and it had to be reprinted three times to meet demand. The holiday season came and went, but the book’s popularity showed no signs of waning. When the fourth printing of January 1956 was exhausted and sales of the bargain-priced volume had reached 187,000, the brewery decided to call a halt and regroup. The decision was made that an updated and more realistically (higher) priced edition would be published later that year. The McWhirters went back to work, and released the fifth edition (known in the U.S. as the second edition) in October 1956. This book, known as “the blue,” was only the second version, meaning the first with any changes to the original contents; it was virtually identical in appearance except for a blue linen cover. Enjoying similar success, the blue became a best seller and was reprinted just two months later. There was no 1957 edition, as the management at Superlatives would spend much of the year trying to break the Guinness book into the larger American market. In 1958 there was a red version, followed by two more biannual editions. In 1964 the book became a recurring annual fixture, and a new version has been released every year since. The editions changed color annually and remained dateless through 1969, after which the book would undergo its first radical transformation in 1970—still under the guidance of Ross and Norris McWhirter.

  The twins were apparently tireless; they continued to update the book, fulfill their other writing and editing assignments, travel extensively, and broadcast. Yet somehow they found time for annual vacations. Shortly after the breakout success of the original Guinness Book of Records, both McWhirters married women they met on ski trips, first Ross in 1956 to Rosemary Grice, and then Norris in 1957 to Carole Eckert. Still, from the reader’s perspective, they remained far more anonymous than the characters they immortalized. The green, blue, and red editions all were authorless except for the mysterious “compilers,” as the McWhirters were cal
led. Always ones to give credit to others, the twins began to pepper the acknowledgments page with names of their office staff and secretaries as early as 1958, but it was not until the black volume in 1960 that the twins themselves got their due, when the facsimile signatures of Ross and Norris began to appear regularly. It became the twins’ practice to thank every single person in the Superlatives office who had assisted in the book’s frenetic production.

  Within a few months, what had begun as a bird-hunting lark and pub marketing scheme had turned into a serious business, and the unexpected success quickly led the Guinness executives to expand into the larger and more lucrative U.S. market. Norris was dispatched to the States to do what he did best—conduct a fact-finding mission and research an expansion strategy. The pressure from above to rush out a U.S. version quickly proved troublesome: 50,000 (green) copies (titled The Guinness Book of Superlatives) were published speculatively for American readers, the name changed out of misguided concerns that Americans would confuse “records” of the sporting type with phonograph records. Working out of cramped quarters in the brewery giant’s New York sales office, Norris managed to hawk a mere 29,000 copies. While not a bad showing for the average new book, it paled before the runaway success at home. The United States had no pub culture of the type Mark Frary described, and on top of that, the twins’ very limited book publishing and marketing experience was with their home market, where advertising was not only unnecessary but somewhat frowned upon. Norris concluded that on the other side of the Atlantic quite the opposite was true, and that “In the United States people will not buy anything unless it is advertised because they think that the manufacturer cannot really believe in the product unless he spends a lot of money pushing it. In New York we were not prepared to advertise our pioneer edition which was unwisely entitled The Guinness Book of Superlatives, and in addition, we had no distribution set-up.” A presumably disappointed Norris McWhirter left the U.S. operations of Superlatives Limited in the sole hands of Miss Dorothy Nelson, an office manager charged with marketing, selling, shipping, billing, and handling returns for the company and its book. Little did Norris know that while it would take a few tough years and the fortuitous intervention of American book publisher David Boehm, his record book would soon become even more popular in the United States than at home—and something fans were obsessed with getting themselves into it, not merely reading it.

  The sixties and early seventies were golden years for the McWhirters and the Guinness records franchise. Having already become a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic by the early 1960s, the world was at their feet, and record mania quickly spawned editions in French, Le Livre des Extremes, and German, Rekorde Rekorde Rekorde. By 1966 a million and half copies had sold, and Japanese and Danish editions were added. By the following year, consumers had snapped up another million copies, and the book was translated into Spanish and Norwegian. Another year and another million and a half copies later, The Guinness Book of Records was translated into Finnish, Italian, Danish, and Swedish, and the book began running full-color photos throughout its pages, not just as the frontispiece. The sixties closed in dramatic fashion, not just with the addition of Czech and Dutch versions but with one of the greatest Guinness records of all time when Neil Armstrong helped to create an important new category—Lunar Conquest.

  By the time the 1970s dawned, the McWhirters had become celebrities at home, but their book needed a bigger venue. Television came knocking, the McWhirters answered, and pop culture would never be the same.

  OBITUARY OF SIR HUGH BEAVER, K.B.E (1890–1967)

  (EXCERPTED FROM GUINNESS TIME, THE NEWSLETTER OF ARTHUR GUINNESS & SON)

  …the slender leisure which he had for hobbies of archaeology, local and natural history, poetry and that omnivorous appetite for reading. He was a particularly fine shot. It was after a shoot by the estuary of the River Slaney in County Wexford, that he was frustrated in an attempt to find out whether the snipe [grouse] or golden plover, which he had shot, was the faster game bird. He had at that moment the inspiration which determined him to commission the Guinness Book of Records. This title has ever since remained a source of irritation to professional publishers who have watched its number of foreign editions grow to the point where it is now available in the first language of 790 million people.

  (The same edition of Guinness Time contains a detailed story about and recipe for the world’s largest cake.)

  3

  Getting into Guinness Gets Personal

  Jack Nicklaus. Bobby Jones. Tiger Woods. Annika Sorenstam. Ben Hogan. Larry Olmsted.

  What do these golf luminaries have in common? Except for one, they are household names, the world’s most accomplished players and in (or headed for) the Hall of Fame. As you might have already guessed, the one exception is me, Larry Olmsted. How do I fit in this Who’s Who of golf greats, this pantheon of smooth swings? I hate to boast, but Annika, the boys and I are all current holders of Guinness World Records for our accomplishments on the course.

  —GOLF MAGAZINE, MAY 2004

  While some records can only be attained by people who have dedicated their lives to acquiring expertise we are also very keen to include records to which people of no particular brilliance can contribute.

  —PETER MATTHEWS, EDITOR, GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS, 1997

  In the spring of 2003, I was like most other people in America: I knew what the Guinness World Records book was, had grown up reading it as a child, had seen it on television, but that was it. I did not really know anything more about the book itself. But my curiosity was suddenly piqued by a newspaper article I had read while on a golf trip to Ireland and Scotland, all about the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the book. I found this milestone and the many other factoids the article recounted very curious, and it stuck in my memory.

  A few months later, I was in New York City, having breakfast with Evan Rothman, the new managing editor of Golf Magazine, the nation’s largest and most influential golf publication. Over bagels, we discussed how golf is often perceived as a rather staid and unsexy sport, and Golf Magazine as an equally staid publication, written for an older, plaid-pants-wearing audience, despite the current boom in youth interest by the sudden dominance of superstar Tiger Woods. Rothman did not want to miss out on this emerging market and was looking for offbeat stories with interesting, humorous, and more unique slants in an attempt to court younger readers. I had heard this tale many times before: it is editor-speak for “we want something different from what we are used to and since it is different we don’t know what it is and cannot really describe it.” Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous nondefinition of pornography, “I know it when I see it,” editors often go on these vague mission quests for new direction.

  Making golf sexy is no easy chore. Lots of people can write magazine articles, but new and interesting topics are hard to come by month in and month out. For a freelancer, good story ideas are the coin of the realm, and soon I was put on the spot when Rothman asked me what kind of “radical, different, edgy” ideas I had for this new format, which I had known about for all of five minutes. As I pondered what exactly could make golf suddenly quirky, sexy, or at least entertaining reading, something in my synapses fired and connected with the newspaper story.

  “How about…,” I stammered, trying to choose my words even as my thoughts were still forming, “…I try to break a Guinness World Record in golf, and write a funny first-person piece about my efforts? Even if I don’t succeed, it should be entertaining.” I began speaking faster, spitting out words before he could say no, pouring out what I recalled of the facts and figures I had read, about the huge sales figures and the global popularity, relating it all to the book’s upcoming anniversary. “We could pepper the story with funny records and even,” I added on the spur of the moment, “run a sidebar on how to go about breaking Guinness Records, about getting into Guinness.” I had nothing else to add, because at the moment, that was the sum total of my Guinn
ess knowledge.

  Like Justice Potter, Rothman knew quirky when he saw it. My proposal was quickly approved and we figuratively shook on it, pending my research and more formal proposal explaining just what I intended to do to get into Guinness, which was an awfully good question. I still knew virtually nothing about the book, about how to go about breaking records, or even about what kind of golf records it covered. So my first tentative steps into the world of Guinness World Records began when I walked into a nearby bookstore to pick up a copy of a book I had not read in more than twenty years.

  I went home and began imagining what kind of record I might break. I toyed with an idea for hitting balls on the practice range until I saw that such a record already existed—and was insurmountable. The record at the time was for most balls hit in an hour, and to avoid the cop-out of tapping them in rapid fire succession just a few inches from the tee, the rules required that each shot travel at least 100 yards to count. Clearly, Guinness had already thought of every shortcut readers might try to use to sneak into its pages. The current record was 2,146, or one ball struck every 1.67 seconds. For me, it was out of the question. Ditto for most holes played in a week (1,706, or thirteen and a half full rounds each day!), most holes played in a year (10,550 or just over 27 a day), and even most golf balls stacked and balanced on top of each other without adhesive (nine…but how?). It was far too late for me to start collecting golf balls: fellow American Ted Loz already had 70,718, each with a different logo. I quickly scanned the golf records in the book and checked out the Guinness World Records website but found surprisingly little to go on. Only about one-tenth of 1 percent of the published entries pertained to golf; to make matters worse, most were not in the book at all. Up to that point, I had assumed the book was comprehensive and contained all the Guinness World Records, but I quickly discovered that less than a tenth of all certified records were actually printed and bound, so I had no real way of knowing what the slate of existing golf records was. In addition, there is virtually no description of how records are set or under what rules, just the results themselves. I did learn from the website, under the flashy headline “Become a Record Breaker!” that I could essentially make one up and try to set a new record. If approved, the bar would presumably be much lower, as I would be the first to try it. Since I was primarily a travel writer, I focused on travel and came up with a few ideas for new records. One was either the most countries or most states played in during the same day, figuring that in either case I could manage three, possibly four, rounds including border crossings. Alternatively, in what I saw as a clever twist on the Guinness classic of the most people jammed in a Volkswagen Beetle routine, I could try to convince record keeping authorities of the wisdom of a record for the most people to ride in a single golf cart while playing eighteen holes, thus sharing my soon-to-be Guinness fame with a select group of golf buddies. But when I called my editor to discuss these possibilities, he quickly dismissed them, explaining that he thought setting a new record was lame compared with breaking one that already existed. To make the story more colorful, he wanted me to beat someone. This mandate sent me back to the pages of Guinness, and severely narrowed my choices.